


The wire mother

by littlerhymes



Category: The Umbrella Academy
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-17 03:22:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/172381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlerhymes/pseuds/littlerhymes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Seance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The wire mother

**Author's Note:**

  * For [schneestern](https://archiveofourown.org/users/schneestern/gifts).



> Thankyou to SQ and i_octopus for beta reading and being awesome.

(11)

"You're honestly not curious?" Klaus says, eyes narrowing. He flicks the keycard from one long hand to another, back and forth and back. "Or is it that you're _scared_?"

The Horror bites his lip and shrugs, recites the boring old refrain: "Well, it's just that Father says-"

"Oh, do shut up," Klaus says. He glides down the stairs to Hargreeve's basement laboratory without looking back. Moments later he hears the pattering of Ben's footsteps behind him.

Down, down, down they go, past the menagerie and the wine cellar, then the submarine, shark pit, and atom smasher to the very last floor and the very very last door. Studded foot-thick iron, the door might as well be marked with skull and crossbones, might as well be labelled _Seance, try me_.

Under the stairs and into the attics and deep into the soft, dark ground - all of these are the Seance's places, hidden places. He's eleven years old and never yet seen a locked box he didn't want to break open.

The Horror sucks in a breath and curls his tentacles tight as Klaus swipes the keycard. Klaus himself feels a thrill of terror as the red light on the keypad blinks and blinks and blinks and -

The door opens.

They step into a darkened room, the stillness broken by the humming of rows on rows of machines. A single too-bright light shines down on a headless, limbless torso, laid flat on a workbench towards the centre of the room.

"It's a _body_ ," Klaus says immediately with relish, while the Horror turns away looking faintly ill. But then he looks closer. "No - wait a second."

It's not a body. The ribcage is pulled gaping wide to reveal a mess of plastic gears and guts. Blue and red wires spill out and over the edge of the table, feeding into a softly blinking computer.

"Oh," Ben says with relief. "It's only a robot!"

"Only a robot," Klaus repeats with curling lip. "That's _it_?"

_Secrets_ , the ouija board had promised, the planchette darting beneath his fingers with a nervous and urgent energy, _answers_. He feels bitterly cheated.

"Okay, we did it. Can we go now?" Ben says, tugging at Klaus' sleeve.

But the spirits still mutter and murmur in the back of his mind. Klaus hesitates - he doesn't need the ouija board to know they want him to stay - and after a moment shrugs off his brother's hand. It can't hurt to look around for a moment longer.

He floats closer and spies a mass of dark hair on the far side of the workbench. The robot's head, Klaus thinks, and wrinkling his nose with faint distaste flips the object over with his mind so they can see the face.

_Oh_ , he thinks and lurches in mid-air. It looks like, he thinks with a shiver, it really does look like -

"Mom?" Ben says shrilly, his hands tight around Klaus' wrist. "MOM?" His voice is too loud, echoing around the room.

"But we saw her this morning at breakfast," Klaus starts to say numbly, stupidly.

And that's the very moment when _her eyes open_.

"Dear boys," Mom says sweetly. "You know you shouldn't be here."

 

(30)

Shinyview _Rest_ Home, they call it. So far it's been anything but _restful_. Questions, questions, questions...

"So. This experience in the basement," says Dr C. Zee, scribbling rapid notes. "I think this is very important, Klaus, I think we're heading towards a break-through."

"Really." Hovering two feet above the therapist's couch with hands folded across his chest, Klaus doesn't bother to disguise his yawn. "You think so."

He checks his limited edition Tag Heuer watch and thinks longingly of his room in B ward, with the view over the zen garden, the latest issues of the _New Yorker_ and _Men's Vogue_ couriered in just this morning.

As far as he's concerned, the only benefit to these 'therapy' sessions is the chance that they'll up his dosage.

"I do." The doctor glances up from her notepad and adjusts her spectacles with a hairy primate paw. "Now. Tell me more about your family."

 

(18)

Inevitably there comes a time when they're no longer to be fobbed off with icecream and trophies. At sixteen, seventeen, eighteen they are demanding allowances and credit cards, new costumes and no curfews.

Though they all have their little rebellions, Diego and Vanya catch most of the heat. Their slouches and sneers and punk rock hair-dos seem specifically designed to invite reprimand. Every other day they're called into Hargreeves' office - perhaps Vanya's hooked her amp into the cold fusion generator again, or there's been a report of a suspiciously knife-related explosion at some seedy downtown bar.

Allison is stealthier. She _says_ she's going to the library or the gym, but Klaus has seen her hanging around the mall and riding in cars with boys. It doesn't surprise him. She'd been getting away with murder before she could talk. Most of the time she doesn't even have to lie, relying on her big eyes, her pretty face, her will alone.

These days even Spaceboy says he thinks Hargreeves is holding them back from their full potential - though to be scrupulously fair, _everyone_ thinks Luthor's obsession with alien invaders is a little crazy.

Only Ben still seems to believe that one day Hargreeves will turn around and say the words they've been waiting all their lives to hear...

Ben also cries at Disney movies.

Oh well. Let the others bicker and weep and throw tantrums. Klaus has better things to do. Like acid, absinthe, Vicodin, Valium, crystal meth, and of course the classic, the tried and true _cannabis sativa_.

Alone in his room, he closes the doors and draws the blinds and sets the needle to the record. He hovers cross-legged above the divan and watches the smoke wreathe up to the ceiling in slow spirals, lets the world drift away to the strains of Debussy and Dukas.

The little that remains of his allowance is devoted to clothes, music, art and other gentlemanly refinements.

It's on one of his many shopping expeditions - his finds including a print of Magritte's _The Lovers_ , a secondhand Hugo Boss jacket - that Klaus passes the tattoo parlour.

He arrests himself midstep and looks at his own reflection in the shopfront glass, lank and angular and even paler than usual. "Do I dare?" Klaus says out loud. He fingers the planchette and miniature ouija board in his pocket, watches his own mouth curl upwards. "Well. How can I _not_?"

Sometimes you just need to make a little mischief.

Klaus goes home that evening with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, hurrying up to his room before anyone can see. He settles down to roll a celebratory joint, his tender palms making the procedure even more delicate than usual, when Mom opens the door without knocking. He hastily slips the joint into his pocket but it's too late to hide the bandages.

"Klaus!" she says, covering her mouth in horror. "Your hands!"

For all their rebellions, their lashings-out, their quiet meltdowns, Hargreeves has never given them the satisfaction of taking it personally. No. As with so many other things, he leaves that duty to Mom.

"But why, Klaus?" she says plaintively when the gauze is unwrapped. "Your poor hands. You have the most lovely hands."

He deliberately spreads them a little wider, HELLO and GOOD BYE inked stark black beneath his skin, and shrugs. "Whatever gave you the idea that I did this for you?"

"But if only you'd have discussed it with your father and I-" Mom breaks off, shaking her head. The joints in her neck creak only slightly. "No, Klaus, maybe you're right. You're all grown up now and the last thing you want is your mother interfering. I understand."

And it would be better to leave it there, to nod and let it go, but the mischief is still working in him and it's too easy to say instead, "Which might be true, if you were actually my mother and not just a piece of plastic."

Mom blinks her button-black eyes and presses her hand to her heart - presses her _plastic_ hand to her _synthetic_ heart, he reminds himself.

"Oh, Klaus," she says. Her voice sounds sad, the approximation of sad, the end result of a thousand sad voices processed through a machine and reduced to an algorithm to be called up on demand. Not real and never was.

He looks away and starts to clumsily re-bandage his hands. After a moment of watching him struggle Mom reaches out and takes the wrappings, starts to do it for him.

"You're not my mother," he repeats, but he doesn't pull away.

She shakes her head, saying tenderly, "dear Klaus." Her fingers are deft and cool on his own. "If I'm not your mother, then who is?"

 

(30)

"I see." Dr Zee thoughtfully scratches her chin with her foot. "Interesting."

This is a promising sign. _Interesting_ , in Klaus' experience, often means more medication. Perhaps even something new and experimental. His fingers twitch.

However, instead of writing a new prescription, Dr Zee lays aside her pen and steeples her paws, saying, "Klaus, have you ever heard of the Harlow monkey experiments?"

"No." He sighs inwardly. The rhetorical games of psychiatrists are by this stage in his life merely tedious, but sometimes it pays to play along. "And they were...?"

"You see, in Harlow's most famous experiment, baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with two surrogates. One was made out of terrycloth and the other-"

The doctor breaks off as her assistant Margaret knocks at the door and enters without waiting.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, doctor," says Margaret, "but there's an urgent call for Mr Klaus Hargreeves, from a Mr Pogo. He said it was extremely important."

The office lobby is cool and dark, wood-panelled to match the doctor's room.

"Hello, Pogo," Klaus drawls into the phone. "You know, you caught me in the middle of the most dreadful therapy session." He pauses and listens a little harder to Pogo's tense, tired voice. "I'm sorry, what's that? The Monocle is-? Really now?"

Margaret at the reception desk looks down at her keyboard and types a little more slowly, straining to overhear.

"Oh," Klaus says, frowning slightly at his nails. He could do with a manicure. "Bother. So I suppose you think I should go to the funeral?"

 

(5)

"Four," Hargreeves announces into the intercom that booms throughout the mansion and the grounds. "Number Four, report to Laboratory C immediately."

The Seance thinks the experiments aren't so bad, at first. He tries lifting heavier and heavier objects with his mind, learns to sound out the letters on the ouija board until they form into words. He doesn't mind, especially not when Hargreeves pats him absently on the head and says, "Good. Good. Fine."

But around the time he turns five, the experiments start getting... stranger.

"What's happening now?" Four asks the first time, his voice tiny and echoing in the big laboratory room. "Will it hurt?"

Hargreeves barely looks at Four at all. "Make sure those straps are tight, Pogo," he says, marking off items on a clipboard. "We don't want him pulling off the wires."

"I'm sorry, Four," Pogo whispers as he tugs the straps down more firmly. He squeezes the Seance's shoulder comfortingly. "But it will be over soon. I promise."

Pogo lies.

It will be hours before Four emerges from the laboratory, pale and shaking, electrodes and wires still trailing from his arm.

"Mom," he moans, his mouth trembling and downturned. " _Mom_."

There she will be, waiting patiently by the door in the same dress as always, with the same sweet smile. She will hold out her arms with a mechanical creak and he'll go running, stumbling, to bury his face in her billowing and empty skirts, to cry himself out in her embrace.

"There, there, my dear." Her voice will be a record on repeat, will be exactly what he needs to hear at that moment. "There, there. It's going to be alright."

And he will believe her.

  



End file.
